In record numbers, nutrition and food bank organizations are joining with the traditional commodity lobby in pressing for a strong enough Farm Bill vote in the House this week to override President Bush’s threatened veto.

Nonprofit groups such as America’s Second Harvest and the Food Research and Action Center have taken the lead, working to line up scores of state and local nutrition groups in an effort to hold together liberal support for the $300 billion-plus package expected to be filed in the House on Tuesday.

While this food-farm alliance is not new to Washington politics, the exceptional force being applied now reflects the pent-up demand after years of Republican rule in Congress and a spike in food prices.

The underlying five-year bill remains bedeviled by last-minute budget glitches that continued Monday. But the Democratic leadership has made a solid commitment to more than $10.2 billion in new nutrition spending on top of the ever-expanding expenditures for food stamp benefits, which now dwarf traditional farm programs.

“It has not been easy to get good things to happen for low-income people,” FRAC President James D. Weill told Politico. “This is one of the best things to come along in a while.”

Old mainstays like the National Farmers Union are still very much part of the picture, and Oxfam is working in opposition. But going into Monday night, nutrition groups accounted for close to two-thirds of the more than 300 signatories on a letter urging support for the package.

This unity will be crucial as House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) tries to reach a 290 to 300 vote threshold needed to withstand the promised veto. The White House and Agriculture Department are poor-mouthing their own chances. But given the steady drumbeat of editorial criticism for the lack of Farm Bill reform, the outcome could be close, and solid Democratic support is pivotal in the more conservative House.

“Everybody’s working every member they can,” said Tom Buis, president of the National Farmers Union. “Absolutely, the nutrition support is crucial.”

For House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who has played a major role in moving the Farm Bill, there is certain symmetry between the House floor vote this week and a second battle over how much domestic spending her party can afford to add to an emergency appropriations bill for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In each case, the choices for Pelosi test what is politically possible, in these last months before the November elections, when faced with a veto-prone White House and conflicts among Democrats about their own party ideals.

In the Farm Bill, the Pelosi had wanted more change than the commodity lobby would accept, including tougher payment limits for wealthy farmers. Instead of this ideal, she has had to settle for stricter accounting of who gets subsidies and new income caps, which — however weak in the eyes of many critics — sets the stage for more change in the next administration and Congress.

Pelosi’s challenge is to sell this compromise to the liberal wing of her caucus — with the help now of the nutrition lobby. At the same time, passage of the Farm Bill will be a plus for her with many in the often-rural, fiscally conservative Blue Dog faction of the party, which has challenged her on the second wartime spending package.

The issue there is whether a new GI education benefit, costing as much as $52 billion over 10 years, should be added as emergency spending — free of the same budget pay-go rules that have so prolonged the Farm Bill debate. Blue Dogs argue that the party would be trampling on another ideal: the principle of using pay-go rules to help narrow the deficit.

One option that has been discussed would be to substitute a less costly education bill, such as one recently reported by the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee that costs less than half of the current proposal for the wartime spending bill. This has bipartisan support and is authored by Democratic Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin from rural South Dakota. But it will be hard for anti-war liberals to back away from the commitment to the more expansive package championed by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), a Marine veteran of Vietnam.

If Democrats sometimes feel at war with themselves, they can take some comfort from the Republicans’ own splits on the Farm Bill.

While the administration casts itself as the champion of reform, it wants to increase direct payments to farmers at a time of record commodity prices. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer is a former North Dakota governor, whose replacement back home has urged the White House to reconsider its veto threat. And Schafer seemed confused last Thursday in discussing the nutrition title and the proposed changes in the food stamp program.

Meeting with reporters, Schafer argued then that Congress was unduly expanding the eligibility for food stamps. In fact, those provisions mirror proposals made by the administration itself, and the greatest single change comes in adjusting the standard deduction used to decide the size of a family’s benefit — not whether it is eligible for food stamps.

“It doesn’t make a single new person eligible,” said Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.